We analyze the effect of growing up on welfare on young people's involvement in a variety of social and health risks. Young people in welfare families are much more likely to take both social and health risks. Much of the apparent link between family welfare history and risk taking disappears,...

How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science - population and variable. Starting with the simplest case...

This paper reviews the literature on gender and culture. Gender gaps in various outcomes (competitiveness, labor force participation, and performance in mathematics, amongst many others) show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time. The economics literature...

This paper explores the connection between education and wage inequality in nine European countries. We exploit the quantile regression technique to calculate returns to lower secondary, upper secondary and tertiary education at different points of the wage distribution. We find that returns to...

Cross-country differences in both the age at first birth and fertility are substantial in Europe. The paper uses the European Community Household Panel 1994-2000 to investigate the relationship between unemployment of both women (and their spouses) with the timing and number of children....

Using 1994-98 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) microdata, this paper investigates the impact of employment protection laws on the incidence of temporary employment by demographic group. More stringent employment protection for regular jobs is predicted to increase the relative...

We exploit the cross-country and time variation in the demographics and education structure in 11 European countries to study how cohort size has affected real earnings in Europe. When we pool the data of all countries, we find that cohort size has a negative and statistically significant effect...

We use eight waves from the European Community Household Panel (1994-2001) to analyze the intertemporal labor supply behavior of married women in six European countries (Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and United Kingdom) using dynamic binary choice models with different initial...

This study uses the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) data, the only cross-national data having measured educational achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate educational achievement decline of fourth graders across 21 European countries between 2016 and...